Stage 3: Revising Web-Site Design To Emphasise Offer

When your web site was first designed, how important a criterion would you say was the visual prominence of offers to acquire customers? Judging by many current sites, the answer is that it was low priority. Yet one of the main aims of a web site has to be converting visitors to customers. This will not happen unless it is a design objective. In the Big Red Fez, Seth Godin presents many examples of where visitors are not encouraged to action. He says:

I imagine the web as a series of offer pages, all competing for us to click. And if those sites make it really clear and obvious where the monkey s banana is, then the time- starved, not very bright consumer (that s you and me folks!) will go for it.

Some people might object to the characterisation of web surfers as monkeys. After all, they say, we are smarter than that. No actually, we re not ... we re busy or distracted, or we have never been to a particular site before and we re not mind readers.

The example below gives an example of how CommonTime has revised its site design to improve acquisition. We can also make these general points about how to increase conversion rate:

1. Try to increase the prominence of calls-to-action, by:

   (a) improving position on screen: are calls-to-action above the fold,...